This post was meant to be a tweet, but it didn't fit, and I hate making threads. So here it is.

I want to share something that has greatly improved my life in the last six months — the SponsorBlock plugin for YouTube. It works in all browsers, and through the magic of self-hosting, even with AppleTV in my living room and, theoretically, with your Smart TV. I'll explain how below.

Yes, we all have ad blockers in our browsers already, with uBlock Origin being the best one, of course. Those living in Europe probably also have the I Don't Care About Cookies plugin, which automatically closes those annoying cookie banners. If you don't have it, I highly recommend it - it will save you at least a couple of years of your life. Now, a third must-have ad blocker has joined this collection — SponsorBlock.

I've been honestly paying for YouTube Premium since day one, but that doesn't save me from "native" ad integrations in the middle of almost every video. Sometimes I have to skip them two or three times in a single ten-minute video.

While I used to be tolerant of ads, letting creators earn their buck, everything has gotten worse over the years — the segments have become longer and more intrusive, sometimes reaching absurd levels where ads take up almost a third of the runtime. The craftiest YouTubers have even started disguising them as part of the content without warning. And no ad blocker helps.

It's especially annoying when you're watching YouTube in the background on TV, doing your own stuff, and you have to keep getting up to grab the AppleTV remote to skip another five-minute integration like "Oh, you want to watch a video game review? You know who makes games? Python developers from Scamcademy, here's a 99% discount on our courses, today only".

The good old pirates from the internet have finally solved this problem and created SponsorBlock — an open-source and non-commercial plugin that automatically skips ad segments and other nonsense like "subscribe to my channel and leave a comment so YouTube algorithms shit themselves".

Here's how the plugin works on another clickbait tech blogger's channel with a billion subscribers in my Firefox:

The cool thing is that it's all crowdsourced. Like Wikipedia. Plugin users themselves mark segments that contain either obvious ads, self-promotion (when the author asks for channel subscriptions or talks about super-donations on their Patreon), or even just "meaningless long music interludes" that some channels are guilty of.

In the settings, you can specify which categories the plugin will skip automatically and which ones it will warn you about in advance. And for favorite channels, you can disable it if you like a particular blogger's ads.

And no, I don't feel any guilt about skipping these segments. Sponsored integrations are paid for in advance, the blogger has already gotten their money from the sponsor and couldn't care less who actually watches their integration. Plus, I pay for YouTube Premium, which means the blogger gets money from each of my views anyway.

It's a total win-win. These segments are neither needed by me nor by the author themselves.

Somehow magically, the plugin works even on small channels, for videos uploaded "47 minutes ago." Maybe YouTube itself provides some metadata about which parts of the video are ads?

I haven't solved this mystery yet, but this "magic" only adds more points to the plugin's score.

And now for the most interesting part — all of this works on AppleTV and many other Smart TV boxes if you watch YouTube through them.

Here's an example. Recorded in broad daylight, sorry for the glare.

I have a big TV in my living room where we watch movies from Kinopub in the evenings, cooking shows play in the background during the day, and on weekends we have YouTube parties with guests.

I've been using AppleTV as a media center for over 10 years. Gone through three generations and still like it: pirate Kinopub is easy to install, AirPlay works, YouTube out of the box, 4K + HDR + Dolby Atmos run smoothly - what else do you need from a TV box?

However, due to Apple's walled garden approach, you can't run any ad blockers, plugins, or other background processes on AppleTV. They even added VPN support just six months ago =/

And here's where our home server comes to help, which I wrote about a couple of years ago.

Ad blocking is handled through PiHole or AdGuard at the home network level. While they can't compare to browser plugins, they do their job well for DNS blockers.

And SponsorBlock, it turns out, has its own version for Smart and Apple TV. It's called iSponsorBlockTV (thanks to meowkoteeq for the tip)

Install it on your home server, open the YouTube app on your TV, go to "Settings -> Pair TV with code", get the code, give it to iSponsorBlockTV and voila — your server now monitors when and what video you're watching and will automatically skip ad segments for you.

Theoretically, neither Apple nor YouTube can block this, since your iSponsorBlockTV server just pretends to be your remote control managing videos.

It just works and doesn't ask for anything. No API keys, no long authorizations, just deploy the docker image and enter the code in settings.

Pretty awesome, right?

The only thing left is to solve the same problem on iPhone and iPad, where there are alternative YouTube clients like uYouPlus, but they still need jailbreak. We're waiting for the dawn of alternative stores in the EU, maybe they'll appear there.

Tell me about other non-obvious ways to protect yourself from ads in the modern world?

P.S.: By the way, the project has a sibling called DeArrow from the same developer, which replaces clickbait previews and video titles like "SHOCK! DON'T GO TO THE BATHROOM UNTIL YOU WATCH THIS VIDEO!!!" with normal human ones. Also powered by crowdsourcing.